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Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) – Simple search across all your apps

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Re: Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) – Simple search across all your apps

#51

Post by jeeyoungk »

I always found this class of product fascinating, as new ones pop up all the time. I remember...

* Google Desktop

* Grepline / Cue (this is W10)

* ... various other products ...

I feel like for personal users, the product ultimately isn't sticky enough.

However, "enterprise search" feel more viable path especially this is where it becomes more valuable (and where the money is). Also anybody whose working at a large company would need to have some enterprise procurements to sign up for such a service anyway. I'm talking about players like Glean in this area.

Re: Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) – Simple search across all your apps

#52

Post by MaxKeenan »

kmos17 wrote: post #46

Congrats on your launch, looks like a very useful tool! Although I have to say the privacy implications are quite concerning before I'd consider using it personally or for a team. You mention at rest encryption, how does that work with indexing the data and making search work? Will you offer retention policies on data? Any plans to include direct messaging platforms (if they offer api's)?

Understand where you're coming from a privacy perspective. Our encryption operates at the file system/storage device layer level so it doesn't affect our index at all other than a small I/O performance hit when storing and accessing data.

W.r.t. retention policies, information is immediately deleted upon account deletion. We also delete all data after account inactivity for 2 months.

Definitely exploring messaging platforms, interestingly enough iMessage (despite not being available via API) can be indexed locally on Macs. Just not something that's on the top of our backlog. Thanks for your thoughts!

Re: Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) – Simple search across all your apps

#53

Post by theolivenbaum »

MaxKeenan wrote: post #39
theolivenbaum wrote: post #32

Welcome to the space - I'm one of the founders from https://curiosity.ai ! It's crazy how much movement there is recently, with Slapdash (now part of ClickUp), Command-E (sold to Dropbox), Raycast and many others, seems like the quest for the one search is still pretty much alive! Really interesting to see how you're integrating LLMs - something we've been curious to play with (but not yet feasible on-device as our a…

Certainly a very lively space, feels like just about everyone is trying to solve the problem at hand. Always happy to share thoughts / learnings in the space -- we should find a time to connect, feel free to email me at max@needl.tech

Awesome, dropped you an email - let's find some time to catch up over some virtual beers!

Re: Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) – Simple search across all your apps

#54

Post by MaxKeenan »

jeeyoungk wrote: post #51

I always found this class of product fascinating, as new ones pop up all the time. I remember... * Google Desktop * Grepline / Cue (this is W10) * ... various other products ... I feel like for personal users, the product ultimately isn't sticky enough. However, "enterprise search" feel more viable path especially this is where it becomes more valuable (and where the money is). Also anybody whose working at a large c…

Good point. It's interesting because, in many ways, search is easier at the enterprise level than the individual level. The usage patterns & social graphs of large orgs is incredibly helpful for relevance ranking. For example, if someone on your team just accessed a doc, the odds you are looking for that doc are pretty high.

Our thesis is that Google Desktop + Cue and the dozens of others lacked was good enough search to be sticky. We're not entirely certain this is the only reason, but we're testing it out.

Re: Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) – Simple search across all your apps

#55

Post by e12e »

MaxKeenan wrote: post #52
kmos17 wrote: post #46

Congrats on your launch, looks like a very useful tool! Although I have to say the privacy implications are quite concerning before I'd consider using it personally or for a team. You mention at rest encryption, how does that work with indexing the data and making search work? Will you offer retention policies on data? Any plans to include direct messaging platforms (if they offer api's)?

Understand where you're coming from a privacy perspective. Our encryption operates at the file system/storage device layer level so it doesn't affect our index at all other than a small I/O performance hit when storing and accessing data. W.r.t. retention policies, information is immediately deleted upon account deletion. We also delete all data after account inactivity for 2 months. Definitely exploring messaging pl…

> Our encryption operates at the file system/storage device layer level so it doesn't affect our index at all

This means you store most data in plaintext in the index? Enough to reconstruct most of the content?

Re: Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) – Simple search across all your apps

#57

Post by MaxKeenan »

e12e wrote: post #55
MaxKeenan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understand where you're coming from a privacy perspective. Our encryption operates at the file system/storage device layer level so it doesn't affect our index at all other than a small I/O performance hit when storing and accessing data. W.r.t. retention policies, information is immediately deleted upon account deletion. We also delete all data after account inactivity for 2 months. Definitely exploring messaging pl…

> Our encryption operates at the file system/storage device layer level so it doesn't affect our index at all This means you store most data in plaintext in the index? Enough to reconstruct most of the content?

Yes. We are SOC II certified and have strict limitations on who can access that data and under what circumstances (only if given explicit permission by the user). Definitely understand that could be a deal breaker for some, but with current methods, we believe that this approach will allow us to deliver more powerful search and greater value in the long run.

Re: Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) – Simple search across all your apps

#58

Post by aloukissas »

MaxKeenan wrote: post #7
aloukissas wrote: post #6

How is this different than Dropbox Dash (formerly known as Command-E)? What I love about Dash is that no metadata/index leaves my computer - are you taking the same approach?

We went the opposite route: users’ entire index is stored on the cloud. We know that’s not for everyone, but the search results it enables are significantly more powerful, and we make clear commitments to our users: (1) we never access users’ personal information without explicit permission; (2) all information is encrypted both in transit and at rest, and (3) we will never sell users’ information. We’ve gotten SOC 2…

Got it. FWIW, the search experience with command-e has been fantastic and super powerful since the beta, so I'm not sure how much more powerful this is to require me to leak all my info to the cloud. It'd be hard to believe it's a 10x improvement e.g.

Re: Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) – Simple search across all your apps

#59

Post by MaxKeenan »

aloukissas wrote: post #58
MaxKeenan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We went the opposite route: users’ entire index is stored on the cloud. We know that’s not for everyone, but the search results it enables are significantly more powerful, and we make clear commitments to our users: (1) we never access users’ personal information without explicit permission; (2) all information is encrypted both in transit and at rest, and (3) we will never sell users’ information. We’ve gotten SOC 2…

Got it. FWIW, the search experience with command-e has been fantastic and super powerful since the beta, so I'm not sure how much more powerful this is to require me to leak all my info to the cloud. It'd be hard to believe it's a 10x improvement e.g.

Cool to hear Command E search has improved a lot -- it's good for the space generally. Curious what platforms you're searching mostly on -- for the majority of Needl users their information is already on the cloud (granted a startup having your data is different than Google).

We've also found searching messaging platforms (Gmail / Slack) and the generative aspect to be the most difficult. Finding links to docs that you know the title of is less challenging. So if you just use Command E for Dropbox / Drive / Local, then it's almost certainly the right solution for you.

Re: Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) – Simple search across all your apps

#60

Post by MaxKeenan »

moneywoes wrote: post #45

What does the prompt injection look like, how do you prevent hallucination

We've experimented with this a fair bit, very low occurrence of the model making up facts when the answer exists within a document, but users have reported outside information (general knowledge) being shown in their results.

We essentially just prompt GPT-3 to ignore everything that is outside of the chunks of information we provide it.

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